Export to UNV (OpenFoam) with pyramid elements; Avoid pyramids for UNV export

Hello, 

I am quite new to Salome and I am now facing a problem. I like to view the flow field around a vane. I did the geometry in ProE, imported it to Salome and have meshed the complex geometry with:

3D: Tertahedron (netgen); 2D Netgen (2D); 1D wire discretisation.  

Afterwards I have exported it as UNV to run an OpenFoam simulation on it. It works so far. But I need to have a structured face for the outlet to analyse the flow distribution there. When I create a submesh for this face with quadrangle (mapping), I will get pyramid elements. They are not compatible with the UNV format, which I need for OpenFoam. 

Is there any other way to export a mesh and import it to OpenFoam which allows pyramid elements? 

Or has anybody a suggestion how I can achieve a mesh without pyramids? I have tried a lot of things like 3d extrusion, Hexahedron. But the mesh generation failed every time. 

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards, Thomas   

Hello Thomas,

You can split pyramids into tetrahedrons using "Split into tetra" functionality but as result your quadrilateral elements will be split into triangles. I don't know if this is suitable for your computation.

St. Michael

Thank you very much! That was exactly what I was looking for!